Monday, December 29, 2008

So I logged in just now and looked at a couple of posts in the drafts folder, figuring I'd do the virtuous thing and finish one of them before starting anything new. But I got tired just looking at them, and the draft posts will have to wait for another day. Instead, I thought I'd raid the archives again. So here are some photos of an old building in downtown Portland being demolished, from way back in May of this year.

Blogging is often thought to be all free-form, unstructured, and spontaneous, but that's not how things typically work here, at least not at the present time. The current formula for a Cyclotram post goes something like this:

Pick out a place (or thing) that seems potentially interesting, go there, and take a bunch of photos.

Sort through the photos, pick some of the best ones, touch them up a bit, and upload to Flickr. If a new photoset appears over on my Flickr page, it's often a sign there's a post in the works, sooner or later. But please, don't pester me about when the post about such-and-such park is going to show up. I don't need that kind of pressure, and I won't make any promises.

Create a draft post with a bunch of photos, and maybe some skeleton or placeholder text.

Add fascinating observations or amusing anecdotes about my visit to the place (or thing), assuming I have any. Alternately, just be snarky and disagreeable.

Whip out the Google-Fu, and dredge up all the weird or interesting tidbits I can find about the place (or thing), add all these links to the draft post.

Somehow whip all the ingredients together into a semi-coherent whole, hopefully something that someone out on the interwebs might want to read someday.

Reread a couple of times, hit "Post".

Immediately reread again, find a couple of things that need changing, and fix those. Optionally, rearrange the order of the photos on the page. This happens more than you might think, actually.

Wait, often in vain, for the search engine hits to roll in.

Repeat as necessary. Or much more often than strictly necessary, as I tend to do.

As I've said once or twice before, the ingredient-whipping is generally the hardest part. That often means I've gone overboard with either the photos or the research. It's fun to scour the net and find everything it's possible to learn about the topic (at least without consulting any dead-tree sources), but when that results in a couple of dozen links to sort through and make sense out of, that becomes kind of daunting. And when you realize you've just taken over 200 photos during the latest "expedition", well, who the hell has time to sort through 200 photos? Who has time to tinker with any decent-sized subset of those photos? Well, I occasionally do, but it's usually anyone's guess when the next opportunity will roll around.

Even now, I'm resisting the temptation to go hit Google and tell you all about these old buildings on Park Avenue, and the shiny new one that Tom Moyer's putting in to replace them. I could do that, but then this post would take longer. So not this time, I guess. I can always come back and add that stuff if it turns out I feel guilty about leaving it out. That's actually happened before. More than once, in fact.